Are your U.S. retirement checks in DR safer now?

If you check the cover page of "El Expreso" newspaper today,you cannot ignore the main headline. The FBI, The U.S.Postal Service and the Secret Service in Miami have coordinated the arrest of a gang which specialized in the theft, forgery and cashing of U.S. government- issued retirement and other checks using our own postal service and other networks to steal thousands of checks destined to Dominicans and foreigners living on this fixed income.

The suspected leader of the ring is none other than Italo Angelini Liranzo. Since this is not in the press, let me tell you who he is.

Italo is the former owner of Ristorante Italo's, which dissappeared and was taken over by another restaurant on Avenida Paseo De Los Locutores across from Instituto Payot. The restaurant used to be a hangout for politicians and high society people who used to hang around with Italo, who lived the good life stealing from the U.S. government and laundering his money into restaurants. He owned several. But when he took a trip to Miami, thinking he could evade the FBI, they were waiting for him. He got caught and spent several months in jail there.

He always got lucky. They let them go after a few months. But he could not keep away from trouble. The restaurant fell on bad fortune due to his absence and rumors that people socializing with him were being watched. Italo was a terror in the Piantini community, throwing trash in the streets and polluting the sewers with cooking oil waste. He even devised a waste water pipe that discharged water in the building next door(Condominio Delta V) and encroached properties around. He would keep his noisy generator and smoky fumes going 24 hours a day. This guy was a menace. He also looked the part with his mafia looking style, silk, gold, Rolexes. He drove jeepetas and a white Corvette.

Thank god for U.S. authorities. They cauight up with him. The next time you see someone in the social pages and magazines and receiving public recognition from the community....watch out!!!! There are scorpions everywhere.

TW

Hey guys

Leave AZB alone. It is hard to avoid criminal elements in Santiago, Crime City, now "giveaway city" after the earthquakes and floods. It seems everyone wants to sell out of Santiago. Buyer beware!!!

By the way, did you know that in the same street of Santo Domingo the following things took place: Angelo Angelini Liranzo created his Italo restaurant, the enclave where he plotted to steal U.S. government checks according to the FBI. Next door to his restaurant is the apartment where a secretary was tortured with lighted matches and beaten to a pulp by goons looking for the engineers who created the ghost project called "Manzanillo Megaport", another Hippo dream never come true. These same engineers had secret meetings in the fourth floor with now- buried Senator Dario Gomez, the most corrupt politician of his time, who at the time was working on another ghost project in Bahia De Las Aguilas. He was killed at a party. Then only a block away one of Hippo's presidential assistants got stuffed with 20 bullets in his Mercedes right at TRIO CAFE. Then across the street, for breakfast every morning is the biggest gathering of corrupt politicians per square miles in the world at a well known bakery(You know the name) Then right across from the former Italo's is the beauty emporium where all the corrupt one's wives go for massages, including the wife of our friend Gomez Checo, who lived right across the street before he was secured for good in La Victoria jail for killing a police officer who castrated him while he was in Najayo Jail for drugs, then killed a policeman in a shootout before getting arrested. He was the most wanted man then. In the same building lives Leonel Fernandez's sister, who uses a navy lieutenant as a messenger boy to take her daughter to Gold's Gym everyday and parks a huge jeepeta assigned to Leonel in the neighbors' parking spaces.All this in the same block area and street!!!!

TW